Twenty views of the West

Best Stories of the American West
is a collection of Western stories in which gunfights are
outnumbered by basketballs, and the cowboy hats end up mangled
beyond recognition. In other words, it's not about the West as
exemplified by John Wayne; it's about a place in which people
actually live.

In compiling this first volume, series
editor Marc Jaffe did something refreshing: He refused to define
the West. His only requirement was that the stories take place in
one of the 11 states in the region. Beyond that, anything goes. The
result is 20 stories from 20 very different writers, some of them
well-known (such as Sherman Alexie and William Kittredge), and
others less so (like John Rember). The plots range from the
scheming of Wyatt Earp to the secrets of flying an airplane in the
Sawtooth Mountains. There are cowboys here, sure, but also bush
pilots and fishermen, teachers and poorly trained paramedics, aged
actors and 40-year-old basketball players.

Taken
together, this hodgepodge of characters reminds us of just how
diverse this region is. We meet people like Roy and Jacinto:
Jacinto, a Filipino migrant worker toiling in California amid a sea
of tomato plants, struggles to eke out enough money to go back
home, while Roy, a rough-and-tumble Southwestern cowboy caught
between tradition and change, finds himself glancing constantly
over his shoulder at the encroachments of city life. These two
characters represent two classic ways of seeing the West: Roy, the
Gifford Pinchot ideal of land use and resource extraction; Jacinto,
Ronald Takaki's view of an empire built largely on the exploitation
of immigrants. Entire political programs could be constructed
around these two figures, but in this volume they are simply
people. They work. They struggle with loss. In terms of their
humanity, they are equals.

Time after time, this
collection reminds us that there is no easy way to live in the
West. "They beat on you one way or the other," says Casey Mullins,
an old man in a Hollywood nursing home who claims he was once the
notorious bank robber John Dillinger. "The pride comes in how you
stand up to it."